


Barbasol

by sunsmasher



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/M, Gratuitous Sadness, and some shaving kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-13
Updated: 2012-10-13
Packaged: 2017-11-16 05:19:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/535953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Terezi learns yet another way to hold a sharp edge to someone's throat.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Barbasol

**Author's Note:**

> For a prompt on the kink meme requesting a het pairing with some shaving kink. They also wanted fluff, but that is not what they received.

Dave tilts his head up, scraping the razor along the foamy skin beneath his chin. The blade along his neck is translucent red, a shard of the Scarlet Ribbitar alchemized with one of Rose’s less eldritch knitting needles. It had a bloody learning curve to it, and ruby has no right to keep so sharp an edge for so long, but Dave’s learned to ignore the game’s unorthodox physics, and he appreciates the aesthetic, in a grim way. 

He works around his lips and chin, tapping a beat against the dull steel of the bathroom counter with his free hand. The meteor’s decor is minimalist at best, soul-sucking at worst, and the sub-level bathrooms, rows upon rows of scuffed mirrors and rusting sinks bathed in thin green light, tend towards the worst. He hopes, as he wipes away a line of watery foam that trickles down his throat, that the others appreciate what a goddamn service he and Terezi are providing, adding some fucking color to the place.

Fourteenth sink from the door, and the light is no less sickly than anywhere else on the meteor, but still Dave catches a glimpse of red, teal, and softer black, still as death in the doorway. He nods to her but keeps quiet, carefully snicking the blade down the sides of his neck. He’s used to her eyes on his, watching without seeing, and her silent observation from the corridor is an easy weight on his shoulders.

He shaves and lathers and shaves again, wipes the foam from his skin and from his razor, and Terezi is long gone by the time he pulls his shirt over his head. He leaves without seeing the five neat punctures in the edge of the doorframe, and does not ponder their meaning.  
—-

There’s green streaked up Dave’s arms in dusty swathes, blocked in solid jade on the sides of hands where he rested them against the wall. He pushes his bangs back from his eyes and leaves another stripe across his face. 

The Green Sun blooms plasmic and nuclear and rendered in chalk before him, overlaying a full section of the wall and extending its glow into the next. He takes a knee and uses a thumbnail to scratch two crude figures into the center of the sun, two shitty little propagators of their own creation myths. 

Terezi works behind him, and when he looks over his shoulder he finds Prospit burning, yellow towers crumbling among the flames. The artist herself colors in tight strokes, red chalk hanging from her mouth, and he can’t see what she’s blocking in on the fragmenting streets of Prospit, but he’s not an idiot. The air is dead for miles between them, clotted and thick, and they haven’t said a word since breakfast. 

“Alright,” he says, because the silence chafes at his mind and makes his stomach go heavy, “what’s the ‘sitch, girl. It feels like we’re at your dad’s funeral and the pallbearers got drunk on shit whiskey and dropped his casket down the steps. There’s dead body everywhere and no one’s laughing.”

There is a long moment and a rattling sigh, then, “I saw you in the bathroom.” She does not look away from work, wrist still tracing sharp lines across the gold. “You had a knife to your neck. I thought you were going to kill yourself, Mr. Strider.”

Dave, for a rare moment, doesn’t know what to say. 

“It was just a straight razor,” he eventually replies. “A big motherfucker, no doubt, but it was the only thing I could get the alchemeiter to spit out. It didn’t take kindly to my attempts at a safety razor.”

Terezi waves a thin-fingered hand in the air, says, “I do not know what any of your nonsense words mean, Dave. I tasted only a sharp edge against your neck and quite a lot of cherry berry blast. I thought you had slit your throat and I was going to watch you die.”

“Shit, tz, no,” Dave says, eyes wide, “I was just shaving, had lather on my face and everything. How the fuck do you people shave except with something sharp? Do you just will the hair away with your freaky alien mindpowers or something?”

Terezi sideeyes him, eyebrows pinched together, and he can see the :? shape of her mouth even at a quarter angle. “You say shaving like it means something other than trimming your furlusus’ coat! Is this yet another hilarious misunderstanding due to poor interspecies communication?”

“I dunno about hilarious so much as morbid to the nth degree, but, yeah, I think we got some wires crossed here.” 

Dave reaches across the narrow corridor and grabs Terezi’s wrist, slides his grip to her fingers and pulls them to his cheek. 

“Here,” he says, presses her hand to his stubble-rough skin. “Feel that? We humans grow hair all over, not just on top of our pretty heads. Dude humans like me, and I guess some chick humans, too, we get a lot of it on our face so we shave to keep the hair short.”

He means to continue, maybe use an extended, tangentially-related analogy to further explain the biology of human hair growth, but he doesn’t. Terezi’s got a look on her face he can’t parse. There’s interest, sure, because Terezi devours knowledge in huge bloody chunks and Dave’s biology is a book she’s only just cracked, but there’s something scrawled across her face he doesn’t think he’ll ever recognize. Terezi is an onion, a Snickers bar, the crust of his dead planet, and he’s seen only what layers she’s shown him. Her center is the great unknown. 

“I’ll show you,” he says, and pulls her up.

——-

Terezi moves in key frames, like God’s inbetweeners never showed her how to go from standing to walking to blitzing with any sort of softness. She is action layered on action, and transitions are minimal.

She handles the razor with like a surgeon would a scalpel, and she’s got it against his skin before he can blink.

“Whoa, girl, hold up,” Dave says, before she can pare the skin from his cheekbones. He filches the ruby blade from her hand and lays it flat against the counter. She stands between him and the sink and his arms snake around her to grab the Barbasol he’s left on the scuffed steel. They breathe the same air for a moment, and he pulls back quickly.

She watches with dead eyes and a set mouth as he applies the shaving cream, long nails skittering gently across the metal. “How often do you have to preform this whole ritual?” she asks.

“About once a week,” he replies, rubbing the foam into the skin of his neck. “I’ll have to do it more when I get older.”

He retrieves the razor, shows Terezi how to hold it with her pinky against the tang.

“If we get older, of course.”

She places the razor just below his eye, and at his direction, draws it down his cheek. One gray hand rests against his forehead, fingers laced in his hair, and pulls his skin tight. Her ash-colored forearm and the wine-dark blade are all he sees. 

Terezi is old hat with a bleeding edge. The razor is steady in her hand, running at a low angle to his skin, and she nicks him only once, going around his jaw. He swears softly, but she pauses for only a moment. Her thumb brushes the bloodied skin as she grips his chin and turns his head.

“So I’ve got a question.”

“Mm-hmm.”

For someone whose hair feels like feathered pine needles, Terezi picks up the human shaving thing pretty quick. The steady scrape of ruby against skin is audible even over the perpetual hum of the meteor’s vents.

“Why did you think I killed myself?”

Her hand never slows, but he feels her weight shift against him, one foot to the next.

“I told you. Because I smelled red akin to your ridiculous candy blood all across your neck.”

“That’s not what I meant. What I meant was, what reason do you think I had to cut my throat? You’re a horrifyingly smart girl, you must have come up with a dozen the moment you laid nostril on me.”

There’s a long pause. Dave shows her how to shave against the grain of his hair.

Hand still firm at his chin, she runs the blade along his neck to his jaw.

“I had my ideas! But in retrospect, I believe I may have been projecting a bit,” she says. 

“Oh, yeah? Watch my chin.”

“Shhhh, I am baring my soul.”

“Heartfelt apologies, miss.”

She smiles a little, in a crooked, bony way. Her fingers brush over his eyes.

“We are adrift in paradox space, destined for not even the horrorterrors know what! Our god-like powers are useless. You are separated from two of your closest friends and I’m surrounded by the lingering deaths of six of mine. We will most likely die before we ever see the sun or moons again. It’s not a heartening situation in which we find ourselves! If you had chosen the quicker death, I would not have blamed you.”

The razor clatters into the sink as she runs her thumb over his cheek, wipes away foam and gives his face a lick. 

“Your bizarre facial hair has been annihilated! Return your shit to you sylladex so we can get back to drawing. Karkat’s door could do with some butts on it, don’t you think?”

“Oh, hell no,” he laughs, humorless and hollow, grabbing her wrist before she can turn away. “You gotta pay the price for initiating real talk time, tz, and the price is real talk time. I don’t want to find you marinating in a puddle of your own alien juices before we even hit the Big Bad. You know he’s gonna have at least three final forms, and I’m nothing without my sword-wielding, mind-reading snapping turtle at my side.”

The smile they share is perfunctory, foam still lingering around Dave’s lips. “Spill, girl.”

“This is not the hardest thing I have ever done, but I think it is close,” she says, settling against the counter. His arms still enclose her, and her breath tickles his chin.

“I am a Seer, but only a Seer of Mind. I can’t see the far-flung lines of fate like Lalonde. I can use only what is before me, in the heads of you five. Four, really, since who the fuck knows where Gamzee is. And you don’t give me enough to know what will happen! Your choices are still irrelevant, as are mine. For the first time in a very long time, I don’t know what to do! I don’t even know where to begin.” 

Her voice trails off. She keeps her eyes fixed to his chest. He thinks it would be very easy to touch her right now.

“I can’t tell you it’ll be ok,” he mutters, and if she was exothermic he’d feel the heat of her against his chest. “Shit, I can’t even tell you this isn’t the fucking high point of the next two years, drifting through nonexistence on a space rock. But here’s the thing, and I guess it’s a thing worth knowing, because it’s a shitty lesson to learn on your own.”

His left hand comes around her waist as his right brushes through her hair, coarse and fibrous. Her eyes flick up over her shades, and he supposes that’s a reflex hard to break.

“You aren’t alone here. Every single one of us, even Rose, we all know jack shit. If we explode when we hit the new universe, I’ll be just as surprised as you. And that’s probably about as glacial a comfort as you can get, but it’s true. None of us can really know what’s coming, and we don’t expect you to, either.”

“If any of us die, it won’t be because you didn’t try every fucking thing you possibly could to save us. I promise.”

She kisses him very softly, arms clutching his shoulders. He picks her up, sits her on the counter, and kisses her back. They are hungry and tired, far from fine, and deep in the labyrinth of sub-level C, they are undisturbed.


End file.
